A Question of Power

Huge chunks of this 1974 novel by Botswanan author Bessie Head were entirely incomprehensible to me. But in between those chunks were bits that I found interesting—glimpses of the main character’s life and the odd off-kilter insights of her mind. Because so much of the novel traces the main character’s descent into madness, it’s entirely possible that it’s not meant to be understood in any conventional way. Her mind is throwing ideas at her. Sometimes those ideas form a pattern and have a sort of sense to them. Sometimes they don’t. And always it’s a battle for her to work out which ideas are real and reliable and which must be abandoned.

The novel, which I understand is to some degree autobiographical focuses on Elizabeth, a biracial woman from South Africa who has brought her son to live in a Botswanan village called Motabeng. Elizabeth has visions centered on two men. The first, Sello, is a priest-like figure who attempts to teach Elizabeth about good and evil but who is eventually caught up in battle with a Medusa figure. The second, Dan, is all id. He surrounds himself with women, each of whom he uses and discards, taunting Elizabeth all the while.

Most of the book, particularly the first half, which focuses on Sello, is consumed with Elizabeth’s visions. Wading through these visions is a challenge to any reader, but I often wondered whether my lack of background in African literature and politics caused me to miss references that would enrich my understanding (or allow me to understand the material at all). I was at times able to pick up bits of prose that I found interesting or insightful. For example, there was this discovery that Elizabeth made as she listened to Sello:

It was the kind of language she understood, that no one was the be-all and end-all of creation, that no one had the power of assertion and dominance to the exclusion of other life. It was almost a suppressed argument she was to work with all the time; that people, in their souls, were forces, energies, stars, planets, universes, and all kinds of swirling magic and mystery; that at a time when this was openly perceived, the Insight into their own powers had driven them mad, and they had robbed themselves of the grandeur of life. As Darwin had perceived in the patterns of nature: ‘There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

She was talking to a monk who had used an unnatural establishment to express a thousand and one basic principles as the ideal life because, in the heat of living, no one had come to terms with their own powers and at the same time made allowance for the powers of others.

I can’t say I followed every bit of her train of thought here, but this idea of how the individual relates to the wider world seems significant. Each person has powers and a choice of how to use those powers, to nurture or destroy, for self or for others. And those choices touch others’ lives.

We see this awareness of community in the way the people of Elizabeth’s village, along with Peace Corps volunteers from around the world, draw their collective knowledge together to figure out how to plant and maintain a garden. The success of their planting depends on the soil, which must be carefully tended. And when a crop does well, decisions about using and selling the crops are important. All the pieces—and the people—are important to making the system work. The last half of the book, which offers more glimpses of the world outside Elizabeth’s mind, show us what the community can be, even in its imperfections.

There’s a lot more going on in the book. I’m sure papers could be—and have been—written about the attitudes toward gender, sex, and sexuality in the book, as well as about race, colonialism, and mental illness. Her visions are full of imagery that I feel sure has meaning I didn’t see. It’s a rich book, possibly too rich for me.

I sometimes see people say they just want to know whether a blogger enjoyed a book or not, or whether a blogger would recommend a book. With a book like this, I don’t think it’s possible to say. I’m not sorry I read it, but I didn’t love it and am unlikely to ever make  books like this a cornerstone of my reading diet. I don’t know that it enriched my reading life that much, although I do find value in trying out books that aren’t quite for me, and I’m glad to know a little something about a major African author like Bessie Head. I can’t recommend it, but I can’t disrecommend it either. It comes down to what you’re looking for, and only you can know the answer to that.

Catching Up on Comics

I had high hopes to get a lot of reading done over the last couple of weeks, but life keeps getting in the way. I did finish The Ringed Castle, the fifth book in Dorothy Dunnett’s legendary Lymond Chronicles, and Jenny and I should have a review for you in a couple of weeks. But that’s about all the reading I’ve managed lately, thanks in part to good stuff, like yoga classes and cooking and theatre and church stuff. But also thanks in part to a cold that wiped me out and turned into a mild sinus infection. And the middle of this week brought a tooth infection that may be the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. Today has been the first day since Tuesday that I’ve felt even slightly normal, and even that normal feeling is due to strong painkillers that are keeping me a little off my game. So although I’ve been too sick to do much work, I’ve also been too sick to read dense text and too sleepy to watch TV without napping. Yet I need distraction from pain. The solution? Comic books.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m interested in comics but intimidated by them. With so many long-running series out there, there’s a high bar for entry, and it seems like a lot to keep track of. For a long time, I relied solely on trade paperbacks to read Fables, but even then, I’d lose track of when new trades were published. When I read the first trade paperback of Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye, I knew I didn’t want to wait for more. Enter Comixology.

I discovered Comixology when I took the Gender and Comic Books MOOC last year, and it’s a wonderful service if you’re intimidated my comic shops and don’t really want to fill your house with hard copies of new comics. Probably my favorite thing about it is that you can subscribe to comics that you like. A few days before an issue of Hawkeye is released, I get a note saying it’s coming (so I can cancel if I’ve lost interest), and then on the release date it appears in my account. They have a comic reader that works well on my laptop, phone, and Kobo tablet, so I can read on whatever device I have handy. It’s probably not the same experience as reading and enjoying the art on paper, but it works for me.

So I’ve used Comixology to keep up with Hawkeye for a while now, and a new issue dropped just this week, and it was perfect reading for a sick day. Right now, the two Hawkeyes, Clint and Kate, are on opposite coasts, and although I’m enjoying their separate adventures, I miss seeing them together. The latest issue focuses on Hawk-guy Clint and is very cleverly put together. It also pushes the story further into more serious territory, but it doesn’t neglect the comedic touches that make the series so great.

I wrote a while back that my feelings about Fables had soured a bit, but after reading Jenny and Vasilly‘s reviews of Volume 18, Cubs in Toyland, I decided to give it another try, and I really loved that book. So I used my sick time to download Volume 19, Snow White, and all the issues that are available (so up through issue #138). The current story arc, Camelot, focuses on Rose Red, one of my favorite characters, and Snow White’s story has taken some interesting turns as well. When I gave up before, I was getting frustrated with the depiction of women in the series, particularly with the idea that youth and beauty equal power, but in recent issues, gender roles have been subverted and toyed with in interesting ways, sometimes through pure reversals, but also through the use of women’s vulnerabilities in relation to men. I’ve been pleased with how it’s going.

So far, all the series I’ve followed are ones that were well-established when I got interested—at least established enough to have led to a trade paperback. But I thought it might be fun to get in on the ground floor of a new series, and thanks to Pop Culture Happy Hour, I found one to try. The new Ms Marvel series features a teenage Pakistani-American superhero. Ms Marvel is not a new hero, nor is she part of a new universe. Kamala Khan will actually be the fourth Ms Marvel, part of the larger Marvel universe. The first issue features several well-known Avengers characters and provides Kamala’s origin story. By the end of the issue, this misfit teen who wants to be popular and powerful is given her new identity as Ms Marvel, but we don’t know what’s in store for her. The first issue was a fun read, respectful of Kamala’s religion and family without denying some of the challenges she faces as a Muslim in America, and I’m interested to see where it goes.

So, dear readers, are any of you comics fans? Are there any series out there you recommend? How do you manage your comics habit?

The Love of a Good Woman

I don’t know exactly what I expected from my first experience reading Alice Munro’s short stories. I knew that she’s considered a master of the form, winning the Nobel prize in 2013. But for some reason, I’d slotted her stories into the quiet domestic drama category, thinking that they would be nice stories of people struggling with ordinary life. I don’t know whether that mental categorization has to do with the way her books are marketed or the non-specificity of the writing I’ve seen about her books or my own inattentiveness. Because her stories aren’t particularly nice at all. They’re quiet, yes, but only because the drama primarily resides in the characters’ minds, bursting forth only when they cannot cope and choose to take decisive action, to leave, to confess, to seduce, to kill, to love.

The stories are intimate, focusing on family and neighborhood drama (I had that part right). A woman writes letters to her lover while visiting her doctor father. A child is born to a war widow. A girl visits her mother for the summer. A grandmother takes her grandchildren for a drive. But each of these seemingly ordinary incidents that have a significance that reverberates throughout the characters’ lives. The narrators, whether first-person or third-person, are watching from a vantage point that allows them to see those reverberations, to recognize these moments’ significance. The narrator in “The Children Stay,” for example, notes how the story’s protagonist will cope with the consequences of her choice, once she begins to realize what it means for herself and her children:

This is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get.

(I particularly like this quote because it seems to be a pretty good description of all kinds of chronic pain, physical and mental.)

The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the highly fraught in these stories opens our eyes to the ways there’s more going on under the surface that we might suspect in any life. We don’t know what’s going on in the mind and heart of the woman watching her two children playing on the beach. We might think we know, but people are good at hiding. You might assume that a young girl in a hospital bed longs for her mother’s touch, but she may be glorying in her own separateness, as Karin in “Rich as Stink” does when her mother, Rosemary, complains that she couldn’t touch her daughter:

Karin says yes. She understood. What she doesn’t bother to say is that back then she thought Rosemary’s sorrow was absurd. It was as if she was complaining about not being able to reach across a continent. For that was what Karen felt she had become—something immense and shimmering and sufficient, ridged up in pain in some places and flattened out, otherwise, into long dull distances. Away off at the edge of this was Rosemary, and Karin could reduce her, any time she liked, into a configuration of noisy black dots. And she herself—Karin—could be stretched out like this and at the same time shrunk into the middle of her territory, as tidy as a bead or a ladybug.

In these stories, Munro often plays with timelines and plot development. Characters are looking back at past events, sometimes withholding key pieces of information that affect how readers interpret those events. In the title story, for example, we get what seem like two separate stories: one of a group of boys finding a dead body, another of a young woman nursing a woman through her last days. Both stories take place in the same Canada town, and the women in the second strand know the dead man from the first strand, but we don’t know how tightly these strands are linked until the story’s final pages. The revelations are often dark, but sometimes they just cast what we thought we knew in a different light. In the collection’s final story, the tragedy I expected proved to be a different, less distressing tragedy that became nearly as distressing as the one I expected as I thought about it.

That’s the interesting thing about these eight stories, the way they turn over and over, going against our expectations and forcing us to rethink what we see, just as life does.

The Home and the World

As a young bride, Bimala took pleasure in “taking the dust” of her husband’s feet each morning as an act of reverence, believing that her woman’s heart “must worship in order to love.” But her husband, Nikhil, didn’t want her worship. He wanted her to have freedom, to go out into the world and discover and become her true self so that they could truly know and love each other.

Bimala and Nikhil take turns as narrators in this 1916 novel by the Nobel prize–winning Bengali author Rabindranath Tagore. As they are trying to figure out how to love each other, a third narrator, Sandip, Nikhil’s old school friend, brings a new point of view, one that appeals to Bimala and pulls her away from her husband. Sandip is a political activist, driven to promote Indian independence from foreign influence. When Bimala hears him speak, she is riveted:

I returned home that evening with a new pride and joy. The storm within me had shifted my whole being from one centre to another. Like the Greek maidens of old, I fain would cut off my long, resplendent tresses to make a bowstring for me hero. Had my outward ornaments been connected with my inner feelings, then my necklet, my armlets, my bracelets, would all have burst their bonds and flung themselves over that assembly like a shower of meteors. Only some personal sacrifice, I felt, could help me to bear the tumult of my exaltation.

The trouble is that Sandip is the last person anyone should give this sort of devotion to. His politics may be on the right side, but his methods and his personality are terrible. My own dislike for Sandip was visceral almost from the start. He is manipulative in all the worst ways. Bimala, longing for a man to worship, gives her worship to the worst possible candidate. And he accepts, as of course he would, although he does so in the guise of making her the personification of the goddess who will drive their political movement. The fact that he accepts her devotion—and that he accepts it in such a skeevy and objectifying way—is indeed a sign that he’s unworthy of it.

In her introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, Anita Desai says that when The Home and the World was first published, critics lambasted it for its unrealistic two-dimensional characters and for its tendency to preachiness about its politics. It may be true that Sandip is too evil to be believed, but I bought it. This kind of manipulation is not unheard of today. (See, for instance, this recent post at Captain Awkward. Sandip is totally a Darth Vader boyfriend.) Sandip knows exactly how to get Bimala to do what he wants, usually in the name of the greater good of the cause. Really, though, he’s out for himself. He tells us this almost from his first appearance:

Every man has a natural right to possess, and therefore greed is natural. It is not in the wisdom of nature that we should be content to be deprived. What my mind covets, my surroundings must supply. This is the only true understanding between our inner and outer nature in this world. Let moral ideals remain merely for those poor anaemic creatures of starved desire whose grasp is weak. Those who can desire with all their soul and enjoy it with all their heart, those who have no hesitation or scruple, it is they who are anointed of Providence.

OK, it is maybe a wee bit unlikely that the entitled jackasses of the world will declare themselves as openly as this, but this is Sandip talking to the reader. When he’s talking to Bimala or Nikhil his desires are all for the cause, for making India stronger and getting free of foreign influence. Yet even here, his actions show a lack of compassion. One of his main principles is eliminating the sale of foreign goods, which sounds like a fine plan in theory, but the practice is more complicated. English cloth might be the only cloth some of the poorer merchants can obtain to sell. Nikhil, while agreeing with Sandip in principle, refuses to force anyone to stop selling foreign goods. He believes in freedom, for the merchants who sell in his market, just as he does for his bride, even if that freedom means they act in ways he disapproves of.

In her introduction, Desai says that the love triangle between Nikhil, Bimala, and Sandip represents the choices Bengal itself was having to face. Bimala is torn between two paths, just as Bengal was. Not being familiar with the politics of Bengal, I can’t speak to this, but I can certainly see that Bimala’s dilemma is about more than two men. It’s a choice between two ways of being—between being free and being governed. And in Bimala, we see how freedom is not always the more appealing option. Freedom is terrifying, for everyone involved. But it is the only right option, whether for a couple or a country.

In case you can’t tell, I absolutely adored this book. I loved it for the personal story of these three people (and the people their lives touch) and for the bigger story it points toward. It’s a tremendous novel, and I hope more people read it.

This novel was translated from the Bengali by Surendranath Tagore.

The Dark Child

One of the most striking things about this 1953 autobiographical novel written by Guinean author Camara Laye is how familiar it feels. I know nothing about French Guinea, where Laye grew up, but this book is not so much about Guinea as about childhood—a specific childhood that happens to be a Guinean childhood. It’s not a book that teaches outsiders about Guinean culture or politics, although readers can pick up some information by being immersed in Laye’s own experiences. We are with him as he goes to school, visits his grandmother, and gets circumcised.

Many of Laye’s experiences would be familiar to children from all over. For instance, there’s his quite funny account of getting bullied by older boys at school and then being appalled and embarrassed at his father’s attempts to intervene. There’s innocent childhood romance, worries about fitting in, and intense studying for exams. It’s a childhood, not so different from any other childhood.

Except of course that every life and every culture is unique in some respects. Laye’s people require their boys to go through a rite of passage by facing down the mysterious Kondén Diara, a “lion that eats up little boys.” As Laye waits for the monster to appear, he wonders what he will see:

And here was Kondén Diara—but was he a man? Was he an animal? Was he not rather half-man, half-animal? My friend Kouyaté believed he was more man than beast—here was Kondén Diara leaving the dim world of hearsay, here he was taking on flesh and blood, yes, and roused by Kodoké’s tom-tom was prowling around the town! This night was to be the night of Kondén Diara.

This ritual was almost as much a mystery to Laye as it would be to many readers, and as Laye learns the secret of Kondén Diara, so do we. But much of the time, Laye, who wrote this while studying in Paris, does not turn this book into a guide to French Guinea for European readers. Many aspects of his life, such as the presence of multiple wives in many families, are just presented as part of the background of his world, never explained or expanded on. It’s a child’s-eye view, and such ordinary matters do not require comment.

Laye does not stick totally to a child’s perspective throughout, however. Once in a while, he pulls back, viewing his life from an adult perspective. Regarding, for example, his mother’s supernatural abilities, he writes,

I hesitate to say what these powers were, and I do not wish to describe them all. I know that what I say will be greeted with skeptical smiles. And today, now that I come to remember them, even I hardly know how I should regard them. They seem to be unbelievable; they are unbelievable. Nevertheless I can only tell you what I saw with my own eyes. How can I disown the testimony of my own eyes? Those unbelievable things. I saw them. I see them again as I saw them then. Are there not things around us, everywhere, which are inexplicable? In our country there were mysteries without number, and my mother was familiar with them all.

It seems like here Laye is writing for a European audience, attempting to “translate” his culture for those who won’t understand it. But I get the feeling that he’s also trying to translate it for himself. After years of studying in France and being away from his people, perhaps he was starting to doubt what he saw as a child. The questions he asks above, is he asking them of himself as well as the reader? When Laye writes of his childhood, there is sometimes a feeling of loss, moments where it isn’t clear that going away and getting educated is the best choice. That wistfulness could apply to the distance he feels from the magic of his ancestors. He talks of how the world moves on, especially for him, and maybe looking back on his past is a way to reclaim that lost magic—literal magic or the magic of innocent childhood.

The Dark Child is short and enjoyable, although it took me several chapters to get into it. The plot is episodic, which made it easy to put down without feeling a strong urge to pick it back up. But once I got used to it, it was fine—and writing about it made me appreciate it even more. Funny how that happens. Once I look for something interesting in a book, I often find it.

The Dark Child was translated from the French by James Kirkup and Ernest Jones

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

At age 30, the poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide, leaving behind two children, a husband from whom she’d separated, and a body of work that he would be left to guard, along with both their reputations. Plath’s husband, the poet Ted Hughes, has been criticized by many for his treatment of Plath during her life and his treatment of her legacy in the years since. Today, Plath and Hughes are today known as much for the controversy as for their work, even though some would say they were two of the greatest poets of their generation. (I would not call either of them my favorite poets, although I went through a Plath stage as a teenager, as so many teenage girls do. I’ve read too little of either of their poetry as an adult to form a strong opinion—although what I’ve read has been arresting, and I can see why their work is so highly regarded.)

Janet Malcolm first became interested in the controversy when she read the 1989 biography of Plath titled Bitter Fame, which she read not out of an interest in Plath but because she was interested in the biographer, a former schoolmate named Anne Stevenson. This biography was attacked for being “propaganda” that served the wishes of the Hughes family, especially Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister, who was then in charge of Plath’s literary estate. This obviously biased biography could not be telling the whole truth.

But is there a single, whole truth to tell? That’s the question that undergirds The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s book about the Plath legacy.

The book is structured as a sort of memoir of Malcolm’s own journey as she attempted to uncover the truth of Plath’s story. She meets with most of Plath’s biographers, reads Plath’s own words in her journals and letters, reads letters and journals of those close to Plath, and discusses Plath and her biographies with Olwyn Hughes herself. (Ted Hughes was still alive when Malcolm was writing, but she did not meet him.) Malcolm admits that by the end of her research she is on the side of the Hugheses, but I don’t get the impression that she’s pro-Hughes and anti-Plath. It seems, instead, that she understands why the Hughes family might want to hold back some information instead of ceding their whole story to the biographers whom Malcolm compares to burglars rifling through drawers looking for treasures to take away and show to the voyeuristic public. To both biographers and the public, Plath is frozen in time, and by association, so is Hughes:

But a person who dies at thirty in the middle of a messy separation remains forever fixed in the mess. To the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’s unfaithfulness. She will never reach the age when the tumults of young adulthood can be looked back upon with rueful sympathy and without anger and vengefulness. Ted Hughes has reached this age—he reached it some time ago—but he has been cheated of the peace that age brings by the posthumous fame of Plath and by the public’s fascination with the story of her life. Since he was part of that life—the most interesting figure in it during its final six years—he, too, remains fixed in the chaos and confusion of its final period. Like Prometheus, whose ravaged liver was daily reconstituted so it could be daily reravaged, Hughes has had to watch his young self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers, and newspaper journalists.

The writers who pick over their story are looking for the truth, but in Malcolm’s hands they become part of a sort of case study in the near impossibility of truth in biography–or in any nonfiction. Malcolm writes:

In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. When James reports in The Golden Bowl that the Prince and Charlotte are sleeping together, we have no reason to doubt him or to wonder whether Maggie is “overreacting” to what she sees. James’s is a true report. The facts of imaginative literature are as hard as the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked. We must always take the novelist’s and the playwright’s and the poet’s word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the biographer’s or the autobiographer’s or the historian’s or the journalist’s. In imaginative literature we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios—there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.

Leaving aside the question of how Malcolm’s statements might apply to works of imaginative fiction with unreliable narrators—or in which the author intentionally leaves facts open to interpretation, it’s fascinating to consider that in some respects fiction could be more true than nonfiction. Once I thought about it, it makes sense. Fiction is part of a closed world, all in the author’s mind, and even if the author deliberately leaves options open, that openness is part of the author’s created world. With nonfiction, there really is a truth that happened, but there are so many mediators between that truth and the reading audience, each interpreting the facts differently or choosing which facts to reveal, with some having a stake in how the story is presented and understood. How can one be sure of the truth?

Malcolm compares the truth of a life to a disorderly house belonging to someone who never throws things away. It is “unmediated actuality, in all its multiplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity.” The job of a biographer is to bring in garbage bags and clear out what isn’t needed so the important things will be visible. But there’s a risk in throwing out too much, or throwing out and leaving in the wrong things. That’s the challenge any biographer faces; it’s no surprise, then, that the end result is often surrounded in controversy.

As someone only moderately interested in Plath and Hughes, but very interested in reading and writing, I found this immensely rewarding. Malcolm raises so many good questions about the reading and writing of biographies. She doesn’t answer them, but I suppose the fact that she continues to write is a sort of answer. She must see some value in it. The pursuit of truth through nonfiction may be futile (and I’m not convinced it always is), but seeing the complexity of a story has rewards, even if we’re never able to do much more than speculate about what really happened.

My Anthology Problem and The Art of the Personal Essay

For the last several months, I’ve been slowly reading through the essays in The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate. It’s an excellent collection, containing many of my favorite essays, all arranged in a rough chronological order to give readers a sense of how the form has developed over the centuries. And I’m finding the reading of it almost entirely unsatisfactory.

I’ve read just over 200 of the book’s almost 800 pages, which takes me through the essays of William Hazlitt, and I don’t know what to do with the experience. I’ve enjoyed some of the essays very much—Charles Lamb’s “The Superannuated Man” is particularly good, but I also liked Montaigne’s “Of Books” and Maria Edgeworth’s “An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification.” The others, however, are lost in a haze. Looking through the table of contents, I can remember that I enjoyed some of them, was bored by others, and didn’t take in a bit of still others. That’s what I’m finding unsatisfying. The essays are fine—I just don’t know how to access them in a way that makes the reading experience fulfilling.

In the past, I’ve read story and essay collections at work during my lunch break. I read maybe 100 pages of this book that way. But my job has gotten busier over the last several months, and I sometimes skip have to lunch so I can make a deadline. And even when I do take a break, the addition of a television in the office break room has made it inhospitable for reading anything that requires concentration, as some of these essays do. I’m better off with a non-taxing general-interest magazine. I sometimes take a my lunch break at my desk, but I feel odd about taking a break and reading a book at my desk. If I take my lunch break at my desk, I usually spend the time doing something on my computer. So office lunches are out–perhaps when the weather is better, I can eat outside again. That’s better for reading.

After a month or so of non-success reading at work, I brought the book home with the intention of reading an essay over breakfast each morning. But that’s no good. In the morning, I’m concerned about what I need to get done during the day, so any reading I do needs to be pretty simple—not to mention really short and easy to put down, so I can get out the door. Magazines, comics, Twitter. And sometimes I just want to sit and listen to NPR as I drink my coffee and eat my toast. When trying to read these essays, I’ve found myself worrying about whether I have time to finish and not really concentrating on the essay.

I don’t generally have this problem with collections by a single author. Those I can read like a novel because even if the stories or essays are different from each other, they come from the same mind. Part of what I enjoy about such collections is looking for the connective tissue that holds the pieces together. But reading an anthology like this in that way would feel like a forced march through a bunch of disparate pieces with no proper attention given to the individual treasures on the path. And these essays—many of them—are treasures. Looking ahead to what I haven’t gotten to yet, I see E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” and James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.”

In his introduction to the volume, Lopate says that he intentionally chose pieces that were self-contained, rather than excerpts from autobiographies that could stand alone. I respect that choice, and it makes me think I’d have more success treating each essay as its own piece, reading it without regard for when I’ll get to the next. Or maybe I’d enjoy reading one a week and posting on it, as Danielle has done for years with short story collections. (She’s currently blogging each Sunday about the crime collection Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, edited by Sarah Weinman.) That approach has a lot of appeal, as I think many of these essays (or essayists at the very least) would be worthy of their own posts—and I’d probably find that process much more rewarding. But I’m not sure I want to commit to a weekly regimen. Perhaps, however, I could read an essay or two as the whim hits me, when I’m between books or need a break from whatever other book I have on the go.

Right now, I plan to set the book aside, leaving it on my coffee table to see if it calls to me again soon. If it does, I may return to the beginning and give those early essays a try—or I may pick up where I am now, with Robert Louise Stevenson’s “The Lantern Bearers” next in line. I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll dip into it at random, as I occasionally do with my old anthologies from college when I’m craving poetry. I’ve never felt the need to read everything in those books, but I’m so happy to have them on hand. Maybe that’s the approach I should adopt with this. We’ll see. But what I’ve tried hasn’t worked, and these essays deserve better than the desultory, half-hearted attention I’ve been giving them.

How do you read anthologies—or do you? What approaches work well for you, both in reading them and writing about them?

Mr. Fox

Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Mr. Fox revolves around three characters and the set of narratives that inform them. St. John Fox is an author of slasher tales: the women in his stories always die, usually gruesomely. Mary Foxe is his assistant, or muse, a woman he dreamed up when he was in the trenches during the first World War. And Daphne is Fox’s wife, their marriage strained by years of distance and lack of connection. “Mr. Fox” is also, of course, a English Bluebeard story, in which the title character murders and chops up his female victims until his clever wife Lady Mary turns the tables on him. Bluebeard winds his way through this book in many guises, from Reynardine to “Fitcher’s Bird” to Yoruba folk tales. The question Oyeyemi poses in Mr. Fox is, how can we tell these stories, even stories of love and violence, in a new way? How can we connect through story? What does it mean to change the narrative, and how does it change us in return?

The premise of the book is established in its first few playful chapters, when Mary Foxe (who ought to be imaginary) “saunters in for a handshake”: Mary is tired of seeing Fox kill off all his women protagonists, and she implies that he’s avoiding the scarier no-man’s land of human connection. Decapitation and dismemberment, she says, are an easy out. What about what happens before death? This is a satisfying way to reframe violence against women in films and books: it’s not just the act, it’s the artistic shirking.

Fox and Foxe start to collaborate, tentatively, and a series of back-and-forth storytelling follows. The reader is left to decide which story is told by whom as the two authors create new narratives, trying to avoid the old gruesome ending (though there are deaths, and at least one more murder, because Mr. Fox can’t help it.) The two characters appear in each other’s stories, but at first they don’t meet, because if there’s no murdering and no dismemberment, how are people supposed to interact? By letter, perhaps, or by proxy, or by far-off glimpses. These two are still figuring out the rules, and so are we: these early stories are lighter and have a bit of a sense of a puzzle to solve.

Later, though, the stories are far richer, as Foxe and Fox begin to dig into the real nature of human connection, violence, and love. Here, the characters connect, even if the connections are sometimes painful, sometimes fraught, sometimes creative or nourishing even through sorrow. The violence changes from the cartoonish slasher-murder that Mr. Fox used to avoid connection, to the real emotional violence of human life and love. And the stories draw us in: a model whose father is dying after committing a tragic act of domestic abuse; towns occupied by foreign armies; a very strange prep school; a fox and his lover. These narratives are complicated and tender, and they have consequences: Mr. Fox’s real life and marriage become more and more relevant, and Mary Foxe becomes more solid herself — less of an imaginary muse and more of a woman with her own will and desire.

This book drew me in, rather as Mr. Fox drew women into his lair, or as Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox drew women into his stories. But I wasn’t killed. Instead, I was given something new: a new way to look at story, to put aside my assumptions and look at the world as it is. Oyeyemi’s language is fresh and beautiful, and this narratively fascinating book provides a wonderful way to turn the old oppressive lair inside out and see what was in there all along.

No Name

Mr. Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children, and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle’s mercy.

With these words, the lawyer handling the estate of Mr. Andrew Vanstone sums up the situation faced by Norah and Magdalen Vanstone, and this novel, which started out looking like a domestic comedy, becomes a story of intrigues and scandal—it becomes a Wilkie Collins novel.

In her review last year, Jenny described the plot in some detail, so I’m going to refrain from that here. Do go read her review if you’re interested in how the story unfolds. The novel is full of plot—of plots, in fact, as younger sister Magdalen Vanstone tries every trick she can think of to win back the fortune she and her sister lost when their father died.

Readers frequently remark on the characterization of the women in Wilkie Collins’s novel. Most notable for many are Marian Holcombe of The Woman in White, who goes toe-to-toe with the dastardly Count Fosco, and Lydia Gwilt, the unapologetic villainess whose schemes fill the pages of Armadale. Magdalen is every bit the schemer that Miss Gwilt is, but Magdalen has a conscience, and she has a sister who is affected by her actions. She cannot fully give in to her drive for justice without destroying herself.

The fascinating thing about this novel is its treatment of Magdalen. The narrative simultaneously supports and condemns her actions. Most of the novel focuses on Magdalen, with a third-person narrator telling her story as it happens, guiding readers to root for her. Her adversaries are described in such as way that we cannot possibly root for them. There’s Mrs. Lecount, a foreign woman obsessed with reptiles and suspicious of Magdalen from the start. She keeps house for the weak and effeminate Noel Vanstone, who now possesses the inheritance that would have come to Magdalen and Norah and staunchly refuses to assist them in their impecunious situation. In contrast, Magdalen is beautiful and clever—and she has of course been unjustly robbed of her inheritance and is only seeking to right that wrong. Who could blame her for that?

But in our sympathies for Magdalen, we forget that her inheritance was only as large as it was because of an injustice done in the previous generation. In fact, the man who inherited Andrew Vanstone’s estate saw his new fortune as a Providential righting of a previous wrong. If justice is to be a guide to right action, who’s to say what’s just? What wrong have Magdalen’s adversaries actually done, as unlikable as they may be?

If we consider Mrs. Lecount apart from her role in keeping Magdalen from her money, she  could be said to have many good features. She’s loyal to her employer, devoted to the memory of her husband, filled with scientific curiosity, extremely sharp and observant, and ready to run to her brother’s bedside when he falls ill. Her only wrong is that she’s keeping Magdalen from her fortune. Yet the narrative pushes us to dislike her because she’s a threat to Magdalen’s plot. The way Collins manipulates our sympathies is quite ingenious here.

Further complicating our feelings are the letters that the characters exchange “between the scenes.” Here, we see others reacting to what Magdalen has been doing. We find out how worried her sister is—and we see how Magdalen’s behavior put Norah at risk. That certainly gave me pause, especially when Magdalen refused to listen to the concerns raised by others who cared about her. She was ready to give up her family and all her friends in the name of justice. This certainly isn’t right. But some of the reasons people turn against Magdalen are ridiculous. At times, it appears that merely being a woman who looks out her herself makes her an object of suspicion. Early in the novel, when Magdalen seems intent on understanding the details of her legal situation, her governess, Miss Garth, fears that there’s a defect in her character that will get her in trouble. It turns out Miss Garth was right to be afraid, but treat strength and calm in the face of turmoil as a sign of poor character seems … wrong. So again, I’m back to sympathizing with Magdalen and wondering what other choices a woman in her situation would have.

But of course we see the alternate choice in the person of Magdalen’s sister, Norah. Norah accepts her fate. She’s unhappy, but resigned to a new life as a governess. And in the end, her choices are vindicated by the turning of the plot. But even this vindication is not a simple act of Providence. The circumstances that bring it about would never have happened if it weren’t for Magdalen’s wrongdoing. So Magdalen, in a way, is also vindicated. Her wrong makes a right.

Although it took a while to get going, this was an absorbing novel that took me places I didn’t expect. Any ideas I might have had about Victorian sensation novels being all about obvious heroes and villains were completely upended. Magdalen, with all her complexity, belongs in that illustrious honor roll of marvelous Collins women. I’m glad to have met her.

The Silent Wife

Teresa and I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl at almost exactly this time last year, and we both liked it a lot. I happened to see someone’s very brief review of A.S.A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife, saying essentially that she’d liked it better than Gone Girl, found it more satisfying and better done. Despite the fact that I don’t know that reviewer well, I was intrigued, and when I found myself at loose ends with an hour to kill in a bookstore, I picked this up.

I guess this novel did get compared to Gone Girl a lot (“this summer’s Gone Girl!” a formulation I despise even more than “if you liked XX, you’ll like YY”), mostly because it’s about an extremely dysfunctional marriage. But to be honest, there’s little similarity between the two books. Gillian Flynn’s novel was about codependent sociopaths flaring out of control, hurting each other through manipulation so extreme that it defied the standards of normal human behavior and tipped over into absurdity and crime and terror. The Silent Wife, on the contrary, is about a marriage that’s absurd only in its surface perfection. Jodi and Todd have money, leisure, jobs they love. Jodi is a domestic goddess and has gorgeous meals and drinks prepared for Todd when he comes home (from his college-age mistress, the daughter of his best friend); Todd brings her exquisite little gifts, tailored to her taste (knowing she will pretend she sees nothing, just as she always has.) 

Jodi and Todd’s marriage has depended for twenty years on their ability to stay on the surface. Jodi has an almost magical capacity to elevate herself above Todd’s infidelities and other cracks in the glaze of her life. She is a therapist, and her approach to her clients’ problems is similar: be positive, comfort yourself, rise above it, ignore it and after a time it will go away. But this time she is forced to acknowledge what is going on, because Todd — impulsive Todd, with his family history of alcoholism and ambition — is leaving her.

The pleasure of this book, for me, was in the way it gently unfolded its protagonists’ psychology. When we are first introduced, we don’t understand why either Jodi or Todd are behaving the way they are: what keeps them on the surface, what could possibly maintain a marriage with so much chaos just under the ice. By the end, we have been put in the place of armchair psychologists, and we’ve been given enough information to know not only that, but also what causes both Jodi’s and Todd’s subsequent behavior and all the consequences. The ending is thoroughly satisfying, not necessarily because it’s what anyone wants, but because it’s what the motivations lead us to believe must happen. Todd and Jodi are caught in their pasts, in their long-ingrained habits, in the way they’ve enabled each other for years. It’s weirdly believable that it all turns deadly so quickly.

The book moves fairly slowly. People who were looking for “this summer’s Gone Girl” might be disappointed by the lack of high-octane craziness. Personally, I liked it; the subtleness worked for me, and I thought the writing was on the good side of workmanlike. It’s also not a long novel, which I appreciate. The 350-page novel is so formulaic these days that I often think authors overstuff their books in order to get a page count. This one was nice and lean. Some of the imagery was a little heavy-handed (Jodi always dresses in beige and white, okay, we get it) but I often find that gets weeded out after the first novel.

Sadly, this was a first novel and a last one. A.S.A. Harrison died just after publishing her book. It’s a shame; I’d have liked to see this particular talent develop. A sneaky, quick, chilly read.